Handbook of the English Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Christoph Reinfandt

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9783110393361
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Handbook systematically charts the trajectory of the English novel from its emergence as the foremost literary genre in the early twentieth century to its early twenty-first century status of eccentric eminence in new media environments. Systematic chapters address ?The English Novel as a Distinctly Modern Genre', ?The Novel in the Economy', ?Genres', ?Gender' (performativity, masculinities, feminism, queer), and ?The Burden of Representation' (class and ethnicity). Extended contextualized close readings of more than twenty key texts from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899) to Tom McCarthy's Satin Island (2015) supplement the systematic approach and encourage future research by providing overviews of reception and theoretical perspectives.

Part I Systematic Questions

Christoph Bode

1The English Novel as a Distinctly Modern Genre

Abstract: This chapter opens with the question why, with a few exceptions, the English novel of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has so conspicuously fallen short of its possibilities. Acknowledging the facts (a) that the modern novel is the only major literary genre to have emerged in the modern age and (b) that as a genre it is still evolving at a tremendous rate, since it is neither bound by any specific form nor by any specific content, it further asks (taking its cue from various theories) what exactly these possibilities are. Using auto-referentiality and self-reflexiveness as its analytical categories, the chapter then attempts a sketchy mapping of the English novel in the twentieth century as a distinctly modern genre and comes up with a consolingly varied picture. The final part answers the question of the future of this genre with moderate optimism.

Keywords: Auto-referentiality, self-reflexiveness, realism, postmodernism, metafiction

1Setting the Scene: Some Discontents

In his 1884 essay “The Art of Fiction” (revised 1888), Henry James criticized English fellow novelists for turning out fiction that simply was not worth discussing: “Only a short time ago it might have been supposed that the English novel was not what the French call discutable. It had no air of having a theory, a conviction, a consciousness of itself behind it – of being the expression of an artistic faith, the result of choice and comparison.” (James 1986, 165) He continued:

During the period I have alluded to there was a comfortable, good-humoured feeling abroad [here meaning ‘widely current’] that a novel is a novel, as a pudding is a pudding, and that our only business with it could be to swallow it. […] Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints; and there is a presumption that those times when no one has anything particular to say about it, and has no reason to give for practice or preference, though they may be times of honour, are not times of development – are times, possibly even, a little of dullness. (James 1986, 165–166)

What James particularly objected to – both in the nineteenth-century English novel and its native criticism – was not only a general disinterestedness in intellectual debate, but also and primarily the novel’s preoccupation with morality (Mr. Besant’s ‘conscious moral purpose’, 1986, 180), its fixation upon subject matter, and its anti-formalist stance. Against this, he set

–the idea of fiction for adult, mature, grown-up persons:

In the English novel […], more than in any other, there is a traditional difference between that which people know and that which they agree to admit that they know, that which they see and that which they speak of, that which they feel to be part of life and that which they allow to enter into literature. […] There are certain things which it is generally agreed not to discuss, not even to mention, before young people. That is very well, but the absence of discussion is not a symptom of the moral passion. The purpose of the English novel– ‘a truly admirable thing, and a great cause for congratulation’ [Walter Besant] – strikes me therefore as rather negative. (James 1986, 181);

–the idea that any novelist should be allowed to choose whatever subject matter they wanted and take it from there: “We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, his donnée: our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it.” (James 1986, 175);

–and finally, the idea that the sole objective of the novel should be to ‘represent life’ (“The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.” James 1986, 166). And in order to represent life as inclusively as possible (“[T]he province of art is all life, all feeling, all observation, all vision.” James 1986, 177), everything would have to be admitted to it:

What kind of experience is intended, and where does it begin and end? Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spiderweb of the finest silken threads suspended in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative – much more when it happens to be that of a man of genius – it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses into revelations. (James 1986, 172)

All these points culminate in James’s exhortation to a novice: “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!” (1986, 173) But this all-encompassing attentiveness would, of course, have to be channelled and its findings subjected to selection (“Art is essentially selection.” James 1986, 177), that is, you cannot write serious fiction without an idea of how you select and how you construct. For the novel to be taken seriously, there must be a “consciousness of itself” behind it. By these standards, James regarded the nineteenth-century English novel largely as a failure.

Although Henry James expressed some faint hope that things were changing for the better, Virginia Woolf, 35 years later, found in an essay on “Modern Fiction” (1919, revised 1925) she still had reason to deplore the sorry state of the English novel – again castigating novelists for not representing life as experienced in the early twentieth century, what with their worn-out, customary conventions:

Is life like this? Must novels be like this?

Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being ‘like this’. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions – trivial, phantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style […]. Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged, life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and circumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it. (1972 [1925], 106)

In “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1923, revised 1924), Woolf repeats the charge: the old ways will not do any longer, we have to find new narrative techniques, try them out experimentally (“[W]e must reconcile ourselves to a season of failures and fragments. We must reflect that where so much strength is spent on finding a way of telling the truth, the truth itself is bound to reach us in rather an exhausted and chaotic condition.” 1971 [1924], 335). But, in spite of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) (↗ 7 James Joyce, Ulysses), Woolf finds, the current situation is bleak:

Why when October comes around, do the publishers always fail to supply us with a masterpiece? Surely one reason is that the men and women who began writing novels in 1910 or thereabouts had this great difficulty to face – that there was no English novelist from whom they could learn about their business. (1971 [1924], 326)

And then there follows one of the most condescending, chauvinistic and xenophobic sentences in the whole of her œuvre (if she speaks in propria persona and this is not represented speech): “Mr. Conrad is a Pole; which sets him apart, and makes him, however admirable, not very helpful.” (Woolf 1971 [1924], 326)

But this unpleasant remark draws our attention to the fact that even in the 1920s – the decade of High Modernism– England remained curiously immune to avantgarde writing: a stale and stagnant backwater. As Hugh Kenner’s A Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers (1988) was aptly summarized by a critic: “International Modernism happened to England but not in it.” (Conrad 1988, 6) After all, the main proponents of International Modernism – Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, etc. – were not English, which leaves us only with Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson. If somebody tried to seriously suggest that E. M. Forster or D. H. Lawrence were radical innovators of the novel, that would only show how desperate the situation was. Thrice marginalized in England (cf. Bode 1998), the modernist writers writing in England found themselves the victims of a stifling parochialism, a ludicrous and constraining provinciality, a xenophobic Philistinism and an atmosphere that was generally averse to experiment and innovation, no matter whether home-grown or imported. Nothing much had changed since the days of Henry James.

But if through much of the nineteenth century and right up until at least the 1930s (if not the 1940s), English novelists, with a few notable exceptions, failed to do their homework and, if they did, found little recognition, it is maybe reasonable to ask what exactly their homework was. What is the modern novel good for? And why didn’t the English deliver (if that account is to be trusted)?

2What Is the Modern Novel Good for? Some Theory

First of all, like all other genres, the modern novel should be entertaining and interesting. But it differs from its predecessors – the novels of classical antiquity and the romances, chivalrous or courtly, of the middle ages – through what Ian Watt called its ‘formal realism’. Instead of damsels in distress, knights in shining armour and fire-spitting dragons, it has credible everyday characters. It is set, not ‘elsewhere’ and in some mythological time, but in a space and in a time that seems, if not identical (because it is fictional), then at least continuous with our space and our time. It replaces stock plots with original, ‘once only’ plots, and these plots are driven not by wonders and miracles, but by action that answers to the demands of reason and causality. It is a new genre that is decidedly of this world. We have grown so accustomed to the realist paradigm of the modern novel (about non-realist modern novels in a moment or two) that we tend to forget how scandalous and counter-intuitive its advent must have appeared. For it is easy to see why there should be a demand for literature that is about things that do not exist in the real world (giants and dwarfs, witches and magicians, the never-never-lands of mythical adventure and unrestrained eroticism, talking animals, supernatural metamorphoses, etc.), but why there should be, in the first place, a literature that reflects things that exist already is truly puzzling (and many of the early novels play entertainingly with that thin line that separates this new kind of fiction from extra-literary fact). Why duplicate reality at all?

There are two explanations for this and they go hand in hand: the emergence of the modern novel in Western Europe coincides with unprecedented social change. As change accelerates, societies develop a sense of their own historicity and there comes a point in time when the literary forms of comparatively static societies will no longer serve the dynamism of the modern age: reality outgrows forms of fiction that have no systematic place for fundamental change but rather celebrate the general, the ideal, the eternal, and such like. In turn, the modern novel celebrates the particular, the individual, the concrete and the specific – and all that is in a state of becoming.

However, accelerating social change is, of course, not only experienced as chance and opportunity, but also as a potential threat. It is more difficult to make sense of things if they are changing all the time. And in steps the second explanation for why it is the modern novel, as an epic genre, that, in its realist mode, so radically transforms the literary scene: mankind has one powerful tool for making sense of life, the universe and everything and for creating meaning, and that tool is narrative. Narrative is the meaningful/meaning-creating linking of at least two events. Narrative transforms what might otherwise be a meaningless succession of contingent, isolated events into a string, a sequence of embedded events that have the semblance of (narrative) necessity. Any kind of narrative can be seen as an instance of what we call by that wonderful German word of Kontingenzbewältigung, the reduction of contingency by narrative processing: you feed the experience of radical contingency into that narrative machine – and out comes the illusion of necessity and meaning. It had to be, as A led to B. It is in the modern novel in its realist form that this essential function of narrative is conspicuously highlighted. And that may be one of the reasons for the success of this new literary genre, a success that, on a world-historical scale, is absolutely unparalleled.

It should be said that, although the modern novel is full of warnings against confusing literature and life, against confusing the story world with the real world (e.g. Don Quixote [1605/1615], Northanger Abbey [1818], and Madame Bovary [1856], to name but the most obvious cases), the readers of this new genre, for all we know, have seldom fallen into this trap. They learnt very quickly that, in spite of the unmatched proximity of story world(s) and real world, the signs in this new kind of literature operated differently (and asked to be processed differently) from the signs of referential texts (although some confused readers will still be looking for 221b Baker Street, believing Sherlock Holmes lived there), since they referred to worlds of their own construction and therefore could, and should, be read (in the widest sense of the word) allegorically – meaning: as saying one thing, but meaning another, so that, for example, the castaway existence of Robinson Crusoe would be read not only as an exciting maritime yarn, but also as an illustration of, say, his isolation from God. But to this auto-referentiality of the modern novel in face of its realism I will return in the next subsection.

First a word about how the modern novel presents the relationship between an individual looking for a meaningful and fulfilled existence on the one hand, and, on the other, a society that, ever-changing and expanding, refuses to be represented as an understandable totality. After that, a brief remark on how the modern novel accommodates non-realist fiction (because, although it has been the predominant, paradigmatic form for a long time, the realist modern novel is, of course, by no means the only one).

To address the first point, this is how G. W. F. Hegel conceived of the modern novel, which he famously called the ‘modern middle-class epic’ (‘die moderne bürgerliche Epopöe’ 1975 [1935], 177) in his Lectures on Aesthetics (1818–1829):

A novel in the modern sense of the word presupposes a world already prosaically ordered; then, on this ground and within its own sphere whether in connection with the liveliness of events or with individuals and their fate, it regains for poetry the right it had lost, so far as this is possible in view of that presupposition. Consequently, one of the commonest, and, for the novel, most appropriate, collisions is the conflict between the poetry o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Editors’ Preface
• Contents
• 0 Introduction
• Part I Systematic Questions
• Part II Close Readings
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Names
• List of Contributors